Page 18 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Masque of Anarchy - Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester England in 1819 + George Cruikshank: The Peterloo Massacre 1819 (published 1832, and 1848).
Four years after the great battle of Waterloo, the rapidly growing cities of Lancashire - including Manchester were represented by just 2 members of parliament (while rural, sparsely populated Isle of Wight returned 3 members). The demonstration at St Peters Square Manchester in 1819, attracted 80,000 people in a peaceful protest for electoral reform, and against poverty. This mass-protest, in a climate of bequeathed by Ned Ludd -and the French Revolution of 20 years before - was completely mis-interpreted by the local magistrates, who ordered the local volunteer cavalry (the Yeomanry) to arrest the main speakers and clear the square. Things got rapidly out of hand: 18 people were killed by the yeomanry, many were badly injured. Local journalists were arrested, Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, the main speaker was jailed for 2 years. There was a huge critical reaction against the authorities. The incident was dubbed ‘Peterloo’ in disparaging contrast to Waterloo, and Shelley, reading about this in Italy, wrote The Masque of Anarchy - a plea - and a first manifesto - for non-violent resistance. It is the ‘greatest political poem ever written in English’ (Paul Foot).
"On 16 August 1819, a crowd of more than 50,000 gathered at St Peter's Fields outside Manchester to support parliamentary reform. The radical orator Henry Hunt was to speak in favour of widening the franchise and reforming Britain's notoriously corrupt system of political representation. Magistrates ordered the Manchester Yeomanry to disperse the demonstration. The cavalry charged the crowd, sabres drawn, and at least 15 people, including a woman and a child, were killed."
"The businessman John Taylor, who had witnessed the aftermath, went on to set up the Manchester Guardian in response. It was via newspapers, almost a month later, that Percy Bysshe Shelley, living in Italy, found out about what became known as the Peterloo massacre. "The torrent of my indignation," as he put it, flowed into The Masque of Anarchy, a poem devised to be accessible to a wide readership but doomed not to reach it. Though he sent it back to Britain, his friend Leigh Hunt felt it could not be safely published, the perpetrators of the massacre having been exonerated. It remained unpublished until the 1830s
This wasn’t the first anti-establishment pamphlet of course: satirical engravings, posters, fliers and prints had been a constituent part of British modern media for over a century. Increasing literacy and the new mass media of newspapers (broadsheets) and magazines, and their ability to carry drawings and cartoons as ‘line’ illustrations - and the popularity of illustrator/cartoonists/caricaturists like Gilray and Cruikshank - and many others - meant a much wider exposure for these critics and commentators in the 19th century.